or apart from a community? We can choose to "give back," or we can choose to give. Viewing the web as a platform for generosity is very different than seeing an opportunity to turn it into an ATM machine.

I find that real collaboration is often as elusive as the woolly mammoth was just before they went extinct. Thousands of books and articles have been written and will continue to be written about such topics as collaboration, teams, and innovation. (I include innovation in this list as no meaningful innovation can occur without people working with each other in highly creative and productive modes). Many use exhaustive data research and analysis of industries/companies past performance in a quest to improve credibility, however in my humble opinion, little if any of the messages stick or cause behavior changes. Many of the concepts simply become brain candy for a leaders psyche. The lessons and language are mostly consigned to the sub-conscious repository of buzz words that are used to feed meaningless rhetoric and pretend/inauthentic dialogue that rarely yields results in a timely enough manner in this competitive and fast paced world.

David Hain's insight:

4 key questions that collaboration will test. "An unexamined life is not worth living" ~ Socrates

No entrepreneur is an island. None of us finds success without a little help from those around us. Effective collaboration is paramount for business success, whether starting your first business or your fifth.

A recent ebook featuring industry experts and analysts commissioned by my company, PGi, explored the 2015 trends in technology and collaboration that it believes will have the most impact on businesses around the world.

It’s vital that entrepreneurs stay on top of the changing landscapes of how teams, departments and businesses work together most effectively. Your time is invaluable, and wasting that time through ineffective communication or collaboration simply isn’t an option.

Here are three of the major trends my company identified and why you should care about them:

Understanding the tactics of collaboration can help make the unique value of working well together real. It’s important because the whole—all of us, humanity—can be greater than the sum of our parts. We often discuss collaboration in terms of its relationship to competition; competition, at its best, can make each part more valuable and more effective, but collaboration adds value to the whole by focusing on how the parts work together.

Effective collaboration depends on effective relationships between humans. If the right people are in the room, and if there is time and space for like minds and potential partners to find and engage with each other, then even the worst-designed gathering can be productive. If the right people are also talented, driven, and a bit entitled, they will make the space they need to be productive regardless of the meeting’s design. However, setting aside time and space is not the whole story. Effective collaboration also requires that all collaborators gain value from collaborating. When the value is reciprocal, other barriers become smaller and the collaboration is easier to sustain.

David Hain's insight:

Stanford on moving beyond platitudes and exploring how to operationalize collaboration. Better tools and facilitation needed.

A big conceit of the knowledge management (KM) field is that knowledge can be transferred, but unlike information or data, it cannot. Knowledge is personal. While knowledge cannot really be transferred, our experiences can be shared. Perhaps that is why we love stories. They are a glimpse into others’ knowledge, more nuanced than any other communication medium.

technology plays a critical role in maintaining connections and enabling loosely coupled collaboration across large numbers of people. Mobile phones, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook play critically important roles in helping these new, more networked movements to stay coordinated with minimal organizational overhead.

You've probably heard the statistics on how under-represented women and minority leaders are in American business, but they bear repeating so get ready to hear them again. Women make up nearly half the U.S. labor force but account for less than 15% of executive officers, and only about 5% of Fortune 500 CEOs. At 12% of the labor force, meanwhile, African Americans make up a small fraction of managers, and only seven head Fortune 500 companies.IT WASN'T JUST THAT MEN TENDED NOT TO GIVE UP POWER TO WOMEN; WOMEN DIDN'T GIVE POWER TO WOMEN, EITHER.Of the many reasons for this leadership gap, a strong contributing factor may be the hidden gender and racial bias that occurs when people in charge delegate power. A trio of psychologists from Penn State University document this uncomfortable (and perhaps unconscious) tendency in a new study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. The result, whether intended or not, is that the heirs to business leadership tend to look a lot like those who already have it.

David Hain's insight:

"Biases used by those in power can perpetuate & reinforce the status quo between dominant & subordinate groups," ~ Soc Psych research

What made Homo sapiens different from the Neanderthals was most likely our social abilities and behaviors, how we behave as a collective. As a human species we have always been very focused on communicating and transferring knowledge. Not only from one person to another, but also parent to child. This way, the next generation can build further on the collective knowledge of the previous generation.

David Hain's insight:

Our ability to share and collaborate has stood humans apart for millennia - now we need to up the game again!

We can no longer rely on hierarchies. The problem is not that they have suddenly become illegitimate, but that they are slow and the world has become fast. It is no longer enough to merely plan and direct action, today we must inspire and empower movements of belief.

3So in addition to the role in formulating strategy and optimizing financial performance, managers must also seek to create synchronized organizations to carry out strategic intent. That requires a focus on small groups, loosely connected but united by a shared context.3

Two years ago, I was asked to lead the transformation of product design at IBM. My challenge isn’t simply to add designers. It’s to create agile, multidisciplinary teams that include designers, developers and product managers.

Designing around the user experience, part of what’s known as “design thinking,” has become crucial to the success of business software. It’s not simply because people expect consumer-type experiences at work, but also because the information we receive and the speed with which we’re expected to deal with it have exploded in just a few years. Work tools must be redesigned for this new complexity.

David Hain's insight:

To collaborate effectively, focus on two things: getting everyone to contribute and letting everyone’s contribution be heard. ~ IBM

Getting the best work out of a team isn’t about silencing the loudest person. It’s about getting everyone involved to explore every angle, bring all ideas to the surface and collaborate on a path forward.

With 2015 just around the corner, it’s time to take a look at the growing collaboration trends that will affect the way you work with your team this coming year. While some are merely logical extensions of ongoing trends, a few may surprise you.

David Hain's insight:

More crowdsourced support and social collaboration tools taking over from email? 2015 collaboration trends predicted.

One solution to hierarchical teams are self-forming teams. Many of the organizations described in the book, Reinventing Organizations, are based on the principle of self-organization where hierarchies are temporary, negotiated structures. Bosses are often voted on by their peers. Self-organizing teams are much more flexible than hierarchical ones, but they require active and engaged members. One cannot cede power to the boss, because everyone is responsible for the boss they chose. Like democracy, self-organized teams are hard work. But they are best to deal with complexity. As I have said before, hierarchies work well when information flows mostly in one direction: down. They are good for command and control. They are handy to get things done in small groups. But hierarchies are rather useless to create, innovate, or change.

Having studied more than 300 companies from three European countries, the McKinsey team has proved that co-creation skills are an important capability of a business and it can pay off, if managed properly.

Why is co-creation and collaboration such a challenge? What barriers are present that prevent co-creation from taking off? Is it individual needs unmet? business goals diffused? Undefined user needs? logistics? This is something that needs to be studied before silos can break down. In the end, it's still about knowing who your audience is and tackling issues based on understanding their motivations.

Is collective decision-making superior to individual instinct? The over-use of information derived from friends and family produces a sub-optimal result, or so says an international collaboration of scientists — and the irony here is not lost on Medical Daily. In a new study, this team of researchers found “individuals overly rely on social information and evolve to be too readily influenced by their neighbors.” Over time, with individuals failing to honor their instincts, the group becomes less responsive to changes in the natural environment, much to the detriment of all.

Here are a baker's dozen of the main principles of connected learning. As you will see, they form an “ecosystem,” where each component influences and changes the others. These apply in any field (although differently in each field). These principles draw from constructivist, engaged “public educators” (Stuart Hall’s term) going back as far as Lev Vygotsky and John Dewey and including Howard Gardner, Franz Fanon, Jacques Rancière, and digital pedagogy theorists including Yochai Benkler, Howard Rhinegold, Mizuko Ito, and many others.

David Hain's insight:

Sustainable learning is the Holy Grail to stay current - and, maybe, survive! Some ideas here...

When WE use Social-Media, especially Twitter, lots of users know already about a PLN (Personal [Professional] LEARNing Network) and through it WE get a MASS of information on a daily base. So, not easy at all when people don’t know how-to organize that information…

David Hain's insight:

Excellent scoop.it site on personal and professional knowledge management by Gust Mees.

The idea of seeing the whole picture is something that has continued with me; from developing meaningful lessons to my “Big Idea” visual notes and it was whilst planning this current post that led me to recall a quote from Steve Jobs:“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

Despite the uniqueness of this quote, most people talk about looking to the future than the past, it rings true for so much that we do. In order to move forwards we must look to the past: to learn from it, to move on from it or to take ourselves somewhere new. There is no point thinking we can develop anything without building on the past, it is the way we have always been. Even Picasso said that all art comes from what precedes it and Kirby Ferguson talked about the remix culture in his TedTalk Embrace the Remix in 2012.

The word “collaboration” is so heavily over-used and over-hyped it’s becoming meaningless. People refer to all social software within a company as “collaboration,” and this causes confusion. Vendors get away with saying whatever they want because they’re not saying anything at all and companies end up failing in their “collaboration” initiatives.

Language is important and with this post I offer up a simple definition of the word “collaboration” — a definition that helps narrow the scope and domain of collaboration and clarify what it really is. Let’s begin with the story of how I’ve become known as “the language police” around the office when it comes to these topics.

David Hain's insight:

Bad collaboration is often more costly than no collaboration. Choose wisely!

The Collaboration Pyramid is intended as a tool that will help organizations to understand what they need to do to make collaboration happen naturally across groups and locations, as well as to increase the effectiveness of collaboration efforts. The model consists of 8 layers, building on each other from the bottom and up. The top 3 layers represent activities that we typically think of as parts of structured team-based collaboration, such as forming the team, coordinating activities, and carrying out the actual activities. These are often formalized, visible, measured and evaluated, just as the result that the team produces. The activities in the 5 lower layers are activities of more social nature, and activities not bound to a particular collaboration effort, such as people introducing themselves to each other, having informal conversations, connecting, creating and sharing information with each other, and so forth. Things that happen on a daily basis, embedded in the daily work.

David Hain's insight:

Useful model of collaboration - the layers below the obvious are critical.

We are becoming the global village that McLuhan wrote about in 1962. Like a tribal village, certain aspects of human behaviours that we have ignored for centuries are becoming important as we move into a network society. There was little privacy in the village, as there seems to be no more privacy today. While we will not repeat the past, there is much we can learn from it. Our new business models should not just celebrate what we have made obsolete, but we should also look back to see what we can retrieve and most importantly, what reversals we can avoid.

Avoiding societal deception in the network era requires an aggressively intelligent citizenry and workers actively engaged in all aspects of democratic enterprises. Continuing to collaborate in hierarchies, with gatekeepers and other control mechanisms, will not transform us into a well-functioning networked society. In the network era, collaboration is outdated. We need to learn how to work cooperatively to deal with the complex problems facing us that cannot be addressed through our existing tribal, institutional, and market structures.

David Hain's insight:

Great piece on why network collaboration can create a new and better way of organising society, from @hjarche

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